Film Explained Simply

taron egerton

I was watching Kingsman: The Secret Service a while back and I remember thinking, “Damn, this feels a lot like Kick-Ass.” Turns out, I surprised myself with my homing missile-like powers of observation because, as I discovered after the fact, Kingsman and Kick-Ass were both helmed by director Matthew Vaughn, also the man behind X-Men: First Class.

Kingsman is incredibly loosely based adaptation of a comic series simply titled The Secret Service, created by Mark Miller and Dave Gibbons. Kick-Ass, lest we forget, was also based on a comic series co-written by Miller as well, which is fine, in as much as we know, more or less, what to expect as far as Vaughn’s stylistic sensibilities are concerned.

The film is a throwback to a number of genres, chiefly the spy-thriller of yester-year, though part of the problem is that it’s trying to keep too many balls in the air at once. Part coming-of-age drama, part action comedy, and part spy thriller, the tone is all over the place like the results of a darts tournament for the blind. Perhaps the best illustration for this claim can be found within the first ten minutes of the film: the opening scene depicts a daring rescue mission, complete with blaring rock music and exploding typography loudly proclaiming the title; the second scene depicts a grieving widow soberly being given news of her husband’s death; and the third presents a Kick-Ass-esque action sequence with weirdly timed a presented comedic elements.

Screenwriting tip: the first few minutes of the movie are vital when it comes to setting the tone. It sets up what the audience comes to expect from the film, so that you can either go ahead with building your dramatic tension, or subvert the audiences’ expectations later on. Kingsman doesn’t know what it wants to be—and it shows— as it flits disconcertingly between largely unconnected aspects of the story. What am I supposed to be feeling, movie? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Talking of story, I can’t seem to wrap my head around some of the more fantastical elements of the plot, mostly because the mostly sober interactions between Firth and his protégé, played by Taron Egerton, keep body slamming to tone back down again. The plot largely centers on a lot of nonsense involving Samuel L. Jackson as some sort of tech-geek cum eco-terrorist wanting to kill everybody, but in a more practical sense, it’s just a largely vestigial framework around which a bunch of contrived action sequences are strung like glimmering Christmas lights.

Frankly, it feels like writers Vaughn and Jane Goldman came up with all the big, showy set pieces, knocked off for lunch, and never came back. Significantly less attention has been afforded to the details of the plot, and it seems like no one really knew or cared how the characters got from point A to point B as long as some people got shot along the way. Sometimes it’s the little things that take me out of a story, as was the case here. From the jaw-dropping stupidity of the villain’s master plan to the way in which none of the cadets reacted in the slightest once they discovered that their training entailed killing them off in order to determine who among them was the most capable, my reaction was generally the same eye-roll and inward sigh of frustration.

But I can occasionally get behind a stupid premise if the idea is done with passion—the Roger Moore era James Bond movies spring to mind—but what I simply can’t abide is attempted humor that just isn’t funny. Nothing is more tortuous to sit though than a film that thinks it’s funny when it isn’t. Kingsman, unfortunately, is one of these movies. It really just drove me up the wall when joke after joke, obvious remark after obvious remark, kept falling flat. And Samuel L. Jackson’s lisp? I bet that was much funnier in the writing room, wasn’t it, guys?

Kingsman subscribes to that incredibly lowbrow, groan-inducing, lowest-common-denominator kind of humor that permeates shows like Family Guy, and I know I sound pretentious as hell right now, but the fact is that I wouldn’t have a qualm if Kingsman had actually made me laugh. But it didn’t. And now we’re here.

Some computer-generated special effects that scream, “Our budget dried up faster that we’d hoped,” certainly didn’t improve matters but, in truth, I had checked out long before that.

The bubblegum-pop infused, blood-lusty action sequences of Kick-Ass are here, but they’re stretched over a hollow, token framework of a story that has far too many plot holes and logical dead-ends for my liking. More than entertain me, Kingsman: The Secret Service just made me weary.